52 comments:

Also, it's ugly. I mean the magazine format looks ok, but the black-and-blue looks like one of those "fake" web pages. And it doesn't seem very useful. Again, the magazine thing is fun, but not really as good as just a list when you're actually trying to find something.

I've had similar problems. I had to type my name three different ways (first-last, first-middle-last, "first last") before anything came up. Nothing for "Alaska Community Property" either. "Glenn Reynolds" had a little over 200,000 hits.

Also it seems very poor branding to have a company whose name is pronounced completely differently than it's spelled. Yeah, I know it's a Gælic word... but it's in the context of an English-language website with nothing to suggest it's a foreign word, therefore the rules of English pronunciation should apply. It's Kweel.

Actually spelling and pronouncing it "Kweel" makes it much more appealing.

Ann's real American Idol, Glenn Reynolds has whitewashed the fact that the shooter was a raging right wing loon, and laughably spins the attack as "anti-Christian." Oh, and he also doesn't mention, conveniently, that the targeted church was gay friendly and progressive and that the guy called himself a Confederate.

Nobody here could be as intellectually dishonest as that, of course...

Anyway, as for the actual topic at hand: I tried to Google---er, Cuil---myself and got this: "Sorry, an error occurred. Please try your search again. If the problem persists, please be assured that our team is working quickly to resolve the issue."

How are they gonna convince me to use it if I can't satisfy my vanity with it?

Quoting Glenn: WELL, THIS MAKES MORE SENSE than that "hated Christians" report, though I suppose the two aren't mutually inconsistent or anything: Police: Accused shooter hated liberals, expected to be killed."

That's whitewashing the fact that he's a right-wing loon? Looks to me that it's an outright acknowledgement.

"Reynolds is a guy who tried to link Tim McVeigh with Saddam Hussein, so this isn't surprising. If the shooter were Muslim, he'd be liveblogging this right now and Michelle Malkin would have about a dozen BREAKING updates. But because the shooter is a right wing crazy -- silence."

I hate the way the search results come up. Where are your eyes supposed to look? Which column contains the most popular links? So many columns! Worst. Design. Ever.

The list format, as someone mentioned, is the only logical way to go. The lady that started CUIL (what an idiotic name) already did her thing over at Google...why couldn't she just be satisfied with that?

Hate to sound really ancient but that is how I react when I read ESPN the Magazine. It has like ten or so small tidbit stories on a page and I find it distracting. Where am I supposed to start and end my reading ?

Where is the best place for a 24-year-old, right at this moment? In school. ---While you still can. Life is long, but you only have a certain amount of good years---energetic years in which to get things like that done and over with.

And, as we know, LA wastes your time. Getting caught up on all the nonsense little LA dramas, on a daily basis, which don't do a thing to further your goals.

And then if you don't fit in---aren't ethnically interesting enough..... even the ones that do fit in, and have cash.... don't have an easy time of it.

The very worst thing, about LA---the way it takes up your time, and gives back, really, nothing in return.

The server seems to be back up. So I searched for myself, and indeed, my LinkedIn page is the second link in.

Only, like Ann, it has someone else's picture attached to it.

I mean, honestly, that's just not cool. If someone really was looking for me, they'd blow right by the link because they would take a look at the picture and know it wasn't me. What is more, the page being linked to has a headshot of me. So they're not even trying, really, to get it right!

I didn't have good luck with Cuil -- our company manufactures a pretty obscure piece of electronic hardware -- we're one of just two manufacturers of this class of device in the US -- and our company didn't come up in the search results for said device in the first ten pages of results.

Admittedly, our website is pretty dated, but if they're looking at content rather than number of links in and out of the page to determine relevancy, they did a really poor job here. Our website has quite a bit of obviously relevant information on this type of component.

This is disappointing -- I was hoping for a viable alternative to Google. Google's results aren't nearly as good as they were a few years ago -- about the only way to ensure decent placement in Google is by bribing them with Pay per Click.

The search results themselves don't seem to bad. The first link is what I expect, a book by Stephen Boyd and Lieven Vandenberghe, a seminal text on the subject. Several of the pictures though are misplaced, however, including...

...a picture of Raquel Welch.

What the heck is she doing there? I mean, yes, she is certainly brightening up an otherwise dull page, but really.

There's Raquel Welch again! Right at the top, attached to link about Stephen Boyd, an author of interactive fiction. The optimization Stephen Boyd is nowhere to be found.

But further down the page I see something that resolves the mystery. It seems that there was an actor Stephen Boyd. Turns out he co-starred with Raquel Welch in the 1966 movie "Fantastic Voyage". There is a three-degrees-of-separation kind of thing going on there.

Very poor interface. Very poor execution. Slow. Above all, it doesn't aggregate results from one site. It also sometimes changes how results are returned in columns making it very poor on a usability scale.

Besides, the name Google has just too much of a hook. By contrast, Cuil is a stupid brand name since it's not phonetic.